Small Bibles for Bad Times

“Only a life lived on the edge such as Liliane Atlan's could have given rise to these highly original poems, at once manic and tragic, electrifying and poignant.” Hoyt Rogers, writer and translator from the French, German, Italian, and Spanish; he has translated books by Bonnefoy and Borges, among other authors

“Liliane Atlan’s poems are as personal as dreams and as public as history. Wry, spare, flickering with wit, they are also resonant, authoritative, weighted with centuries of what Atlan calls ‘the wisdom that is not inscribed,’ that ‘makes written notes inexhaustible.’” Rachel Hadas, the author of many books of poetry, prose, and translations — her most recent book is Poems for Camilla.

Liliane Atlan writes both prose and poetry with the beauty and brilliance of lyric, the bite of epigram, the passion of an idealist fighting to survive in a brutal world. In the colloquies of great poets held in the next world, I imagine her seated with her peers—perhaps at a table with Kafka, Bob Dylan, and Emily Dickinson. Having her work in this bilingual edition, with Marguerite Feitlowitz’ elegant translations, is a valuable gift to the English-speaking world of experimental literature.”—Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems, 2002-2012

FOR LILIANE ATLAN (1932-2012), visionary French writer of plays, poetry, and prose, her creative quest was to “find language to say the unsayable. . . to [find a way] to integrate within our conscience, without dying in the attempt, the shattering experience of Auschwitz.”

After spending the war years as a child in hiding, she later studied at the groundbreaking Gilbert Bloch school in Paris where she studied Torah, Talmud, and Kabbalah, alongside science and contemporary literature. As a writer, Atlan defies easy categorization—she was known as “a Jewish writer,” “a Holocaust writer,” an originator of French feminist writing, and a pioneering theater artist. Her writings are steeped in Jewish sources and her French is inflected with Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish. This background helped make her into a genre-defying, feminist, and political writer, active in both France and Israel.

This bi-lingual French-English language collection of Liliane Atlan’s poetry and non-fiction prose introduces Liliane Atlan, to the...read more...